The Navy's Newest Warfighting Imperative

In the maritime operating environment, enormous challenges have been created by the explosive growth and global pervasiveness of information technology, its relatively low cost compared with that of conventional warfare systems, and the ease with which it can be “weaponized” to degrade or deny the U.S. Navy’s overwhelming superiority. Moreover, those hostile to the United States incessantly exploit our networks, necessitating our constant vigilance and aggressive, intelligent action.

These everyday realities, combined with information’s prominence in national, joint, coalition, and Navy strategic objectives, have compelled us to organize and use the Navy’s information “portfolio” in a way that achieves real warfighting capability. The January 2012 guidance Sustaining U.S. Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, the 2012 Chairman’s Strategic Direction for the Joint Force, and the Chief of Naval Operations’ Sailing Directions and Navigation Plan are all replete with objectives consistent with this. Just as the United States dominates the maritime domain, we must do the same in the information realm, which includes cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum, if we are to preserve our Navy’s superiority and primacy.

From our perspective, this is a new center of gravity for maritime warfare. Optimizing information is critical to the Navy’s core capabilities of forward presence, deterrence, sea control, power projection, maritime security, humanitarian assistance, and disaster response. Controlling the information domain, therefore, is a warfighting imperative that must be mainstreamed into the Navy as an operational discipline alongside air, surface, and submarine warfare.

Contextualizing Information Dominance

At some level, most Navy personnel understand the importance of information to the service’s mission. However, to appreciate its dominance as a warfighting discipline, it is necessary to view it in a broader context, one that characterizes and clarifies its essential forms in warfare and as warfare. Each of these representations influences the way the Navy organizes, resources, and executes its missions. Although each category presents a warfighting risk, there is also tremendous opportunity as we defend our asymmetric capability presented by these technologies. We must learn to consider information in any or all of the following ways, according to the situation and overall context:

Enabler: Access to superior information has been a military essential for millennia, but the importance of acquiring, exploiting, protecting, and moving combat information has become increasingly critical. What has changed is the instantaneous speed and massive volume at which it can be discovered, accessed, processed, exploited, and disseminated, regardless of its origin or intended destination. Enabled by these technologies, the military force that senses, processes, and delivers information more efficiently and effectively than its adversary will enjoy enhanced and predictive battlespace awareness, better command and control (C2), and greater decisional agility.

Weapon: The Navy is inextricably dependent on cyberspace and its information and networks, along with the terrestrial and space transport paths for its operations. In effect, the network and its components (information, intelligence, technology, people) have become a combat system. In this form, the network can serve as a platform from which to launch information as a weapon. As an enabler (information in warfare), it has evolved as a nonkinetic weapon (information as warfare). As noted previously, the military force that best uses its networks and cyberspace to exploit and attack the vulnerabilities of its adversaries will have a combat advantage. Moreover, the integration of nonkinetic or electromagnetic strike options with traditional kinetic fires will significantly enhance the overall warfighting effect. This is why the network must be operated and “fought” as a warfare platform, in the same way as are aircraft, ships, and submarines.

Threat: Connectivity provides Navy platforms and weapon systems with unprecedented speed, agility, and precision. It also opens numerous attack vectors for adept cyber opponents. Cyberspace has a relatively low barrier of entry for adversaries to effectively challenge and hold Navy forces at risk. Over the past several years, states, terrorist organizations, “hacktivist” groups, organized criminals, and individual hackers have attempted to exploit Navy networks. These efforts have served to map and exploit seams in our networks, facilitate massive information theft, deny and degrade our access to cyberspace, undermine confidence in the integrity of our data, and disrupt our C2, combat systems, and dependence on over-the-horizon intelligence. The threats, combined with the worldwide proliferation of advanced long-range weapon systems and opponents’ cyberspace capabilities, have the potential to reduce the Navy’s technological and operational advantage.

Warfare domain: As detailed here, warfare’s historical domains have been physical, and platforms—infantry, cavalry, tanks, ships, submarines, aircraft, and spacecraft—have served in both supporting capacities (enabling combat) and supported roles (engaging in combat). The relevance of the physical domains and their associated platforms has remained largely unchanged, but what is new, with the advent of radio, computer, and network technology, is the emergence of the electromagnetic spectrum—specifically cyberspace—as not only an enabler of the physical domains and their respective platforms, but as a warfighting domain in its own right. The network and the electromagnetic spectrum are fundamentally the battlespace within this realm. They are likely to figure largely in future conflicts and crises, and the military force that most effectively engages in cyberspace will create an advantage.

Operational Constructs

Within this context, we define information dominance as the operational advantage gained from fully integrating the Navy’s information functions, capabilities, and resources in a way that optimizes decision making and maximizes warfighting effects. It includes cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, networks, communications, space, meteorology, oceanography, electronic warfare, and of course the electromagnetic spectrum. It also encompasses the constituent components (resources, capabilities, governance, tactics, techniques, procedures) that must be marshaled and aligned with doctrine, organization, training, matériel, logistics, personnel, and facilities.

Our vision for information dominance is assured maritime C2 and superior battlespace awareness that allow for sustained, integrated fires across the full range of maritime warfare. These three fundamental facets will posture the Navy to maneuver and engage its opponents at the nexus of the maritime and information domains. When all three are achieved, they provide Navy commanders with the ability to operate freely in the information domain, well ahead of the adversary’s decision cycle.

Assured C2: The Navy must ensure its ability to command and control forces. This requires capabilities that permit commanders to exchange orders with subordinates, target and conduct strikes as part of the joint force, and assess the results. Navy mission success—from sensing the environment to understanding our opponents to operating and defending our communications and linked systems—is inextricably linked to the assurance of C2.

Battlespace awareness: This is the traditional mission of the constituent components of meteorology, oceanography, intelligence, cryptology, communications, networks, space, and electronic warfare. It leverages persistent surveillance of the maritime and information battlespace, penetrating knowledge of the abilities and intent of our adversaries. It provides an understanding of when, where, and how they operate, and of their expertise within the electromagnetic spectrum. When performed in harmony, these skills and knowledge provide the target acquisition and targeting solutions necessary to execute successful strikes.

Integrated fires: With information dominance the Navy can use its networks, cyberspace, and space to exploit and attack the vulnerabilities of its antagonists to achieve nonkinetic effects (i.e., fires). This proficiency maximizes the Navy’s dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum to deny its use by potential enemies for their own operations. Nonkinetic attacks may augment and provide an alternative to kinetic weapons, thus satisfying a commander’s combat objective with stealth and less or no physical destruction. Therefore, the ability to integrate these types of strike options with traditional kinetic fires multiplies the warfighting advantage.

The Cyberspace Dimension

Cyberspace is the digital “fabric” that weaves into the information environment individual, organizational, corporate, government, and military entities. It is elemental to their operations and permeates the physical domains. The Navy leverages cyberspace to provide commanders with operational and tactical advantages. Practically all major systems on ships, aircraft, submarines, and unmanned vehicles are networked to some degree. This includes most combat, communications, engineering, and position, navigation, and timing systems. Additionally, cyberspace extends equally across joint and Navy business and industrial control systems.

Allowing for speed, agility, and precision in a broad range of missions, cyberspace delivers the reliable, secure communications that are essential to effective C2. Network-centric weapon systems like the Tactical Tomahawk use cyberspace to receive in-flight targeting data from operational command centers. Similarly, carrier aviation maintenance programs rely on it to deliver mission-ready aircraft. Even the most routine activities, such as training, education, medical, and logistical functions are conducted via cyberspace. Despite its speed and convenience, however, it is laden with vulnerabilities and threats that can affect Navy networks and reduce combat readiness.

Because of the service’s increased reliance on these types of operations, cyberspace superiority and our maritime dominance are essentially interdependent. Success in the maritime domain and joint operational environment depends in no small part on our ability to maintain freedom of maneuver-and-deliver effects in cyberspace. Therefore, protecting access to it is just as paramount as is protecting sea lines of communications. This is why, in addition to the previously listed fundamental facets of information dominance, the Navy:

• Operates, defends, exploits, and engages in cyberspace to ensure access for all mission-critical functions and to provide Navy and joint commanders with resilient C2 capabilities. This is assured access to cyberspace and confident C2.

• Evaluates adversary actions in cyberspace through dedicated cyber-intelligence collection and analysis, and by fully integrating timely and relevant cyber information and threat warnings into the commander’s operational picture. These measures are intended to prevent strategic surprise in cyberspace.

• Delivers decisive cyber effects at a time and place of the operational commander’s choosing, across the full range of military operations in support of the commanders’ objectives.

From Abstract to Reality

The Navy has laid the organizational foundation for dominating cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum by consolidating the resources and manpower for its information-intensive programs, commissioning the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command to serve as its component commander to U.S. Cyber Command, and establishing Navy Cyber Forces as the type commander for these important mission areas.

To further enhance the service’s use of information in warfare, we will concentrate changes and improvements in three core areas: warfare development, warfighter development, and warfighting capability. We will produce and employ new operating concepts and a Fleet-level concept of operations and tactics, techniques, and procedures. We will also improve our recruiting, selecting, educating, and training of information-related professionals. Finally, future warfare capabilities will focus on better controlling the electromagnetic spectrum, extending our defensive and offensive capabilities in the cyberspace domain, and maintaining the speed, agility, and adaptability of our decision-making and C2 abilities during operations in a communication-degraded or -denied environment. Ultimately, these efforts will yield the following, which will result in information dominance as a warfighting discipline:

• Secure C2

• Persistent, predictive battlespace awareness

• Unified combat information

• Integrated kinetic and nonkinetic fires

• Technology innovation

• An optimized information workforce

• Reforms in planning, programming, budgeting, execution, and acquisition

The Future Is Now

While the Navy is making increasing use of all forms of information for peacetime and wartime operations, the relevance of information dominance has never been greater, particularly as our adversaries design new ways to exploit our networks and inhibit our mastery of the electromagnetic spectrum. Of equal concern is the expanding number of critical shipboard and airborne systems, including combat, communications, engineering, and positioning, navigation, and timing systems that are linked and vulnerable to cyber attack. A more holistic view of what constitutes “the network” is required—across type commands, systems commands, resource sponsors, operational users, and security classifications—to ensure that interoperability and defensive measures are built in and actively employed.

Lastly, the cold, hard reality of increasingly constrained budgets in the immediate future forces us to make tough programmatic and fiscal choices that will doubtless limit the scope and range of enhancements the Navy must have to rule the information domain. Nevertheless, we continue to organize, train, and resource a credible workforce, developing forward-leaning, interoperable, and resilient information capabilities.

In spite of the challenges we face in achieving assured C2, battlespace awareness, and integrated fires, the future has arrived, and there is no turning back. Information in all its forms will continue to evolve. We must evolve with it. Whether characterized as cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, networks, communications, space, meteorology, oceanography, or electronic warfare, this new center of gravity in maritime warfare means that information dominance has become a Navy warfighting imperative.